Robert Virding worked at the Ericsson Computer Science
Laboratory and was one of the initial Erlang design group. He has took part in
the original system design and contributed much of the original libraries, as
well as to the current compiler. While at the lab he also did a lot of work on
the implementation of logic and functional languages and on garbage collection.
He has also worked as an entrepreneur and was one of the co-founders of one of
the first Erlang startups (Bluetail).
Robert now works for the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration (FMV) in a
modelling and simulation group where he mainly works with computer games. He
contributes to the Erlang community in his spare times and has written a number
of books and articles on Erlang.

There have been relatively few Erlang implementations and today there is really only one widely used Erlang VM, the BEAM. This talk will describe the history of the BEAM and other Erlang implementations that have been done, the differences between them and how they have performed. It will also discuss some influencing factors which need to be considered when implementing Erlang.